Clothing is one of the necessities of human life and a means of personal expression. As such, clothing or garment manufacturing is one of the oldest and largest industries in the world. However, unlike other mass industries such as the automobile industry, the apparel industry is primarily supported by a manual production line. The need for automation in garment manufacturing has been recognized by many since the early 1980s. During the 1980s, millions of dollars were spent on apparel industry research in the United States, Japan and industrialized Europe. For example, a joint $55 million program between the Ministry of International Trade and Industry (MITI) and Industry, called the TRAAS, was started in 1982. The goal of the program was to automate the garment manufacturing process from start, with a roll of product, to finish, with a complete, inspected garment. While the project claimed to be successful and did demonstrate a method to produce tailored women's jackets, it failed to compete with traditional methodologies.
Currently, a sewing machine uses what is known as a feed dog to move the product through the sewing head relying on the operator to maintain the product orientation and keep up with the feed rate for the rest of the good. Previous attempts at automated sewing used the feed dogs on a standard sewing machine and had a robot perform exactly the operations a human user would perform. Desirable in the art is an improved automated sewing machine that would improve upon the conventional automated sewing designs that are unable to process wrinkles and/or folds, which may be introduced while the product to be sewn is moving on a robotic sewing system. The value of this disclosure is to provide a flat piece of a product to be sewn for an automated sewing machine allowing the machine to function properly without mistakes caused by a wrinkle or bump in the product to be sewn.
The subject matter discussed in the background section should not be assumed to be prior art merely as a result of its mention in the background section. Similarly, a problem mentioned in the background section or associated with the subject matter of the background section should not be assumed to have been previously recognized in the prior art. The subject matter in the background section merely represents different approaches, which in and of themselves may also correspond to implementations of the claimed technology.